Journal, Journal, Journal

In this reading, there is a discussion of “pausing and reading”, which is quite the opposite of Elbow’s theory of free writing.

Personally, I like the idea of “pausing and reading” because I do it all the time. I’ll write for awhile then I’ll stop, go back and read through what I have written to make sure I am on track of saying whatever it is I am trying to say. I do this because sometimes I tend to stray and ramble about things that have no relevance to the topic of the piece. I’m not saying that is bad because sometimes it brings along new ideas that you can use for the paper, but other times it can allow the writer to stray completely off path. With Elbow, he suggested that you write everything down first then go back and re-read it. While I think this method is useful for some projects, the majority of the time I believe it’s better to “pause and read” to have a well-planned and successful piece. For me, I realize my work turns out better if I stop writing and read through my work and then continue.

Another thing I wanted to mention was the topic of journals. I have said this before and I want to say it again – I think journaling is one of the best ways to get students’ ideas flowing and it allows them to get more comfortable with writing in general. As I previously stated, I definitely will be using journals in my classroom for students to write down whatever it is they are thinking at that time, to allow them to clear their thoughts or write down ideas they have bouncing around in their head. I originally got this idea from what I did in middle school – although it was with reading. In my 6th grade language arts class and all of my middle school study periods, we were “required” to read for the first 10 minutes of class – read whatever we wanted, and I think this method really got our brain running and thinking. If we chose not to read, we had to sit there in silence and do nothing (not even our work) until those 10 minutes were up, and frankly that was quite boring, so most student chose to read instead of starring at the chalkboard.